Tuesday, May 11, 2010

This past Saturday, the whole family went to a park along Lake Georgetown in nearby Georgetown, Texas for a Mother's Day weekend camping trip. We joined three other families we know to camp on three adjacent camping sites. This was our first time at this park and it was actually very nice. I brought along a ton of stuff which included some fishing tackle and our two fishing kayaks.

Weather conditions on Saturday were fairly nice with overcast skies and temperatures in the 70s to 80s. The days before we had started seeing temperatures with highs in the low 90s but a cool front came through late Friday evening. The one thing that wasn't particularly positive for kayaking was winds between 15 to 18 mph with gusts above 25 mph.

Lake Georgetown, like pretty much all the Texas lakes, is a man made lake caused by damming the North fork of my beloved San Gabriel river. It is a good size lake covering about 1,297 acres. Besides largemouth bass, crappie, white bass, catfish, and striped bass it supposedly also contains smallmouth bass which is a species I have yet to catch on the fly.

The kids all wanted to paddle the kayaks so we went down to the swimming area of the park and I let them paddle around. After they had their fill, I took one of the kayaks on a scouting paddle to go fishing on Sunday morning. The shoreline was mostly rocky with some vegetation but not a lot. Not a lot of ledges either that I could tell. The wind was pushing me quickly which meant I would have a hard paddle back so I didn't go far and came back to the beach.

That evening I made burgers, hotdogs and sausage for 17 of us and we ate really well. I was stuffed! We made smores and toasted marshmellows, played some games and told some stories around the campfire. I turned in around 10pm.

I got up just before 6am and loaded up the kayak in my truck and headed down to the shore. It wasn't as windy as the day before but as soon as the sun started coming up, so did the wind. I fished the shoreline for about an hour and got just one bite. My stomach was grumbling so I came back in and headed back to camp.

At camp, I started up a grill to heat up an iron pan to make pancakes while someone else made omelettes. Once again, I ate way too much! Sometime later we all went down to the shore to fish for a little bit before returning for lunch and then packing everything up to leave before 2pm. Needless to say we didn't catch anything.

Regardless of the fishing, the rest of the weekend was a lot of fun and I hope my kids had fun, too. We plan to do this again in the fall when the weather is cooler.

Friday, May 07, 2010

Read this story a couple of days ago and my cousin in Corpus saw it on the news as well. Pretty scary night for those two kayak anglers. Thank God for the game warden and that the two kayakers came out OK.